Harith Alani

Harith Alani is a Professor and Deputy Director at the Knowledge Media institute, The Open University in the UK. He’s the founder and leader of the interdisciplinary Social Data Science research group, which focuses on applying AI and computational social science methods to model, understand and track various social phenomena on the web, and in particular on social media. In recent years, the work of Prof Alani concentrated on studying online misinformation, supported by several international projects, including HERoS; to study the dynamics of COVID19 related misinformation and fact-checks, Co-Inform; to analyse individuals’ interaction with misinformation on social media, and CIMPLE; to investigate knowledge-based explanations of misinformation detection techniques. Of special interest to Harith’s research on misinformation are the inter dynamics of false claims and their corresponding fact-checks, the use of computational approaches to assess the information reliability of individuals on social media, and the impact of actively correcting their misinforming messages. Prof Alani is an active member of the Semantic Web, Web Science, and The Web Conference communities. He was the General Chair of the International Semantic Web Conference in 2021 and Co-Chair of the Web Content Analysis, Semantics, and Knowledge track at The Web Conference in 2018.